The Grass Tool with landscape is a very awesome feature in ue4. I wanted to ask if Epic has any plans to extend this to static mesh. I understand with this you don’t get collision compared to procedural foilage. Also maybe procedural foilage with mask textures for static mesh would be nice.
I am wondering how scattering of foilage will work for UE5 especially since import of high meshes would be a thing. Would landscape still be a feature or static mesh terrains would be the norm?
I like this question. And yes while its nice to see UE5 previews, it´s also a little unfair for world-building artists since we kinda guess into the wild how this next gen world-building will look like. Where to define spots for climbing. Where and how to define spots on geometry meshes like Overhangs to get some foliage and good blends into landscape. I have like 100 questions and every day its getting more.
So, I would love to second this question. Any ideas how to incorporate static meshes (lets say some cliff mesh with overhang for example) with landscape and use foliage on both. In best case at the same time. Maybe it already works but I did not find any solution, yet.
Cheers and stay safe,
Toby
@VictorLerp Hi Victor, Sorry for the bother. Are there any plans to add this for static/movable meshes?
I don’t fully understand the question. You can add Actors to the foliage tool and paint them just like meshes, etc. Or are you talking about dynamically adding meshes to specific texture values on any static mesh in the scene?
he’s probably talking about using the grass node for landscape on non landscapes…
Yes, MostHostLA is correct. I am wondering if there are any future plans for that. Also the choice to add scatter meshes using a texture/mask would be really cool.
You can use textures/maths to mask out the alpha for grass-layers in landscape materials. As well with foliage tool, you can specify which layer you want to paint on specifically (if you want). With the foliage tool you can also add scriptable-actors (w/blueprints) to the mix, not just static meshes.
Either way you should have much control on how/where things end up.
As for expanding the use of the grass-nodes in landscape materials, I agree that adding more functionality here would likely be useful. Stuff with actual collision so I could add rocks (large/small) or maybe even scriptable actors like the foliage tool. It’s sometimes easier to make a rule-driven (well math driven) material to just-make-it-all-come-out automagically.
4 things.
why would you use a layer or a node in the material instead of just using the procedural foliage stuff - in which you can specify a landscape layer? There’s really no need to add the grass input to a material to utilize the procedural foliage system (which although experimental also offers collision and i believe actor placement).
sure, adding the grass node function to meshes is useful. But what would be more useful is to have the ability to assign and use a landscape layered material to any mesh without problems. That way custom landscapes coming in from 3rd party (houdini?) As properly LODd and far more performant ststic meshes wouldn’t need to be fully baked.
…obviously this forces a slur of changes that on the engine side… I’m hoping the epic team takes things that way.
there’s some talk about this in the last bit of one of Ryan Brucks presentations from a few months ago.
It’s not quite clear what or how it is - but he was showing or rather showcasing the ability to control what children are spawned and where procedurally, using textures and a bunch of other interesting procedural geberation features.
if 1 isn’t clear, you can already place items with collisions on a specific layer by using the procedural foliage tools.